Push
by miss-emotive
Summary: The motionlessness of unfeeling eyes and twitching fingers would tug happily at his heartstrings and he'd grin, then cut-smile, then chuckle, then laugh and laugh and laugh... He sobbed with the hilarity of it.


**Push  
**By Jun-Ko

"_Y'see, madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little...push._"  
-- Joker, _The Dark Knight_

* * *

It wasn't a lie, not completely -- she'd been, here and here, above the flower shop, beneath his body. Weightless, massless, hair lank and eyes dark, smelled of wild honey and sandalwood that burned in lazy wisps. The whisper of white skin on the wood floor, toes dangling prettily, painted red toenails, she danced on air. He picked up the chair and put it back with the rest of the dining set. She danced on air.

Everywhere was her, flushed against him, pressed and neat, a paper flower. Whispering secrets in a foreign tongue, bells on her toes like royalty of the east and nursery rhymes, the sound of her hands on wet stone. He slid into her like the end of summer run, her arches like cathedral structures beneath his palms. The wet swaddled stone of her grazing his fingers, rock pools at low tide, briney but sweet. Glass doorknobs and wooden windchimes. Red handprints, carnival paint. The perfect whorl of her fingertips, pressed and neat against the blank white walls. Her name was once tattooed inside of his mouth, hiding like a treasure behind each of his perfect unmarred cheeks before he, the solemn-eyed, had let it vanish and it had, like smoke, never to return, never never. He blames her for all of it; gently coaxing him into untried madness with her tinkling laughter.

... gravity, she said. Only a matter of time. You, me.

"Don't push me."

She smiled.

After the dance, he cut her down from the crossed beams and held her close, so that he could smell her honey breath, so the claret that dripped from his face made rivers on hers. He opened his mouth to speak but she was so close, too close, pulled to him involuntarily by the gravity, like madness, between them -- mouth open like a cave and empty of words, eyes like sunken stones full of regret. Bright red ring of flesh, a new necklace, tongue swollen and spat-up. A kiss he's been waiting for his whole life, a kiss that splits his grin wide and devil-red, a kiss he pulled the temple down for sinking deep sinking his teeth into her form yielding blood, tearing this other kind of kiss from her lifeless, loveless self. (A self left to flounder amoung the sharks.) She'd left him alone to clean the mess by himself -- the puddle pooling beneath her, their things broken on the floor, glass embedded into the soles of his feet. Everywhere, broken china and splintered wood. They came when he was out and took her and made her stand on a chair tying her to the crossed beams with rope to make sure she wouldn't fall and said, "dance for us." And kicked.

And so it hadn't been a lie when he said to the woman in the devastating gown, a mess of gold and black, a terrible mess -- not completely. She was true. A part of her, at least. She who danced before him, she whom he smiled for -- truly smiled -- for the first time. A razorblade mess, "you said we'd go together, always together, forever." She danced on the air between the cherry-stained wooden floor and crossed beams and course rope, and hoped, foolishly, that he would follow her with the map of hell on the blade's edge, a winding green road along his wrists. And though part of him -- the part the blade would find -- would mourn, the motionlessness of unfeeling eyes and twitching fingers would tug happily at his heartstrings and he'd grin, then cut-smile, then chuckle, then laugh and laugh and laugh, as his body moved to pick up the chair haphazardly horizontal and return it to the dining set.

Between her fingers glinted the clandestine steel he plucked like a sharp grey flower, exploding the skin on his face, crying and laughing at the same time, two sides merged with the force of... gravity? Gravity, like... _what was it?_ Now is a time for merry-making, bomb-shaking, he shook and crumpled onto the floor, breathless with laughter and breathless with hate, belly and throat swollen with glee. Blood, red, dripping down his chin, mouth downcast and wretched. She who once was now a dangling meat sack. Arms wound around his middle he sobbed with the hilarity of it, unable to close his mouth, salva and blood pooling beneath him, unable to stop laughing at the sight of her dangling toes, at his reflection on the floor.

He cut her down and she succumbed to the gravity of their apartment room, no more church-arches or wet moans or visits to the late garden. Hands that once glided over his skin a mess of life lines etched in red. Lips like roses, tasting of wild honey, blue like a drowned child's. _She'd..._ They had vanished, like smoke never to return, never never -- never again, he promised her. No one, no where, like you. No one -- a clot of blood and bone, sandalwood wisps, a paper flower -- like you.

A shattering of glass and smatter of syllables, the woman in the devastating gown dangling as she had been, over a window edge, wind-whipped but not unfeeling, not fearless as she had been. _No one like you_, he'd promised. Not anywhere. He was a man of his word.

He held her to his chest and whispered into the woman's ear, "can you dance on air?"

Madness... like gravity, she had said, warning him not to push her over the edge as his hand had turned into joker cards. "It's only a matter of time until we all fall."

He smiled.

He let go.

* * *

_My first Batman Begins/Dark Knight fanfiction, hohoho. I've taken to the movie and have actually seen it four times so far. A bit much, but it was just too awesome... Anyway, I had wondered if it would be too pretentious to assume that anything I wrote, least of all anything involving the Joker, could be considered as "transgressional fiction," but when I read the definition of it as being about, _"highly dysfunctional... relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience," _I thought, well, holy hell. In any case, hope you enjoyed it. Comments/reviews are always, always appreciated._


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